On 04/02/2018 08:52 PM, J Decker via Unicode wrote:
On Mon, Apr 2, 2018 at 5:42 PM, Mark E. Shoulson via Unicode
<unicode@unicode.org <mailto:unicode@unicode.org>> wrote:
For unique identifiers for every person, place, thing, etc,
consider
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universally_unique_identifier
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universally_unique_identifier>
which are indeed 128 bits.
What makes you think a single "glyph" that represents one of these
3.4⏨38 items could possibly be sensibly distinguishable at any
sort of glance (including long stares) from all the others? I
have an idea for that: we can show the actual *digits* of some
encoding of the 128-bit number. Then just inspecting for a
different digit will do.
there's no restirction that it be one character cell in size...
rendered glyphs could be thousands of pixels wide...
Yes, but at that point it becomes a huge stretch to call it a
"character". It becomes more like a "picture" or "graphic" or
something. And even then, considering the tremendohunormous number of
them we're dealing with, can we really be sure each one can be uniquely
recognized as the one it's *supposed* to be, by everyone?
~mark